OVERTHINKING

by Xenia Makridou

Have you ever felt so empty and sad that you just lay on your bed without moving or thinking? I guess people do that when a loved one dies. Or when they feel that the whole wide world has turned against them, and there’s no light to exorcise the darkness. You just lie there, curled up into a little ball, alone. And you want nothing, and no one. It’s a beautiful solitude, but it’s a scary loneliness. It can get you up to mischief.

I just lay there, yesterday. Over in my little personal dark corner. Until the day turned to dusk, and nothing mattered any more. It felt so calm and beautiful, just doing nothing. And it looked like that, too. Until I had no more separate thoughts and feelings, as they had all become a complicated mess and mass of nothingness. It was a frightening emptiness to feel and to know. When everything you have, you don’t want. And everything you stand for, you suddenly regret and hate. And every person you thought cared for you, and whom you cared for, are now distant strangers, with flawed lives and personalities, always making mistakes, failing over and over.

But there’s nothing you can do; no escape door to run to. And you find yourself in a maze of understanding, inevitably leading to anger, distress, and eventually sadness. All you can do then is to pull your shit together and keep going through hell, until you find that escape door. It might be soon, but it might be centuries away. It’ll show up, some day, either way, though. And that’s what kept me going till today. This ultimate hope of finding my escape door, some day.

“Sometimes, you gotta give up on people. Not because you don’t care, but because they don’t.”